Quotes by Seymour Papert

“The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.”

“Our interest is really in Third World development. I believe that its essential to solving the problems of poverty, violence, and environment, to have better education.”

“I think there is good reason to believe that if everything were open, fewer bad things could happen. So give everyone the tools to observe and communicate what is happening.”

“It will change . . . the way children everywhere think about themselves in relation to the world.”

“None of thats there in an African village. How can we give it to them?”

Every maker of video games knows something that the makers of curriculum dont seem to understand. Youll never see a video game being advertised as being easy. Kids who do not like school will tell you its not because its too hard. Its because its--boring

But the interesting cases are those where the conflict remains obstinately in place however much we ponder the problem. These are the cases where we are tempted to conclude that intuition cannot be trusted. In these situations we need to improve our intuition, to debug it, but the pressure on us is to abandon intuition and rely on equations instead.

“Generally in life, knowledge is acquired to be used. But school learning more often fits Freires apt metaphor: knowledge is treated like money, to be put away in a bank for the future.”